


Works of Heart

by Nerissa



Category: Embassy Row Series - Ally Carter
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Loyalty, Polyamory, Pre-Canon, Protectiveness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 03:44:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9053863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: He has always been hers to command, from first to final breath.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [baroqueriot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/baroqueriot/gifts).



_Jamie’s heartbeat fluttered, faint and failing. His blood flowed, though not as freely as before, and Dominic tried to ignore the way Grace was staring at them both._

_Like he held her life in his hands._

_It was a look he knew too well._

 

* * *

 

“Do you trust me?”

Caroline held her hand out, laughing, the ocean at her back and the wind tossing her hair in a way that made his heart catch in his throat. Dominic, staring at the angle of her chin, missed the question. Made her repeat it.

“Do you _trust_ me?”

Her eyes were bright. He pulled her close and felt her heartbeat echo against his own chest.

“Always.”

Her fingers twisted through the fabric of his shirt.

“Then let’s jump.”

If it had been anybody else he’d have thought he hadn’t heard her right. But Caroline was electricity, sparking and relentless. She drew him close, he gripped her waist and watched her shine in his hands.

“Jump,” she said softly. Then, softer still, “and don’t let go.”

As if he’d ever.

They jumped. The sky and the sea sped past, and they hung, timeless, in the middle. They cleaved the water, cold bright knives stabbing all over, and kicked, languid, rolling through the thick boiling bubbles.

They broke the surface together, gasping, Caroline laughing up at the sky.

“Kiss me,” she demanded, and he drank her in, greedy. She was the air his lungs had been burning for and he needed her to know it.

The way she moved against him, lifted her face to his and shone with the glory of her power over him . . . she knew.

 

* * *

 

He shared her because she insisted on it. Ann and Karina were her friends, she explained. More than that, they _understood_ her. He understood her too, which was why he didn’t argue. He knew she would never give up until she had it all her way, so he stood back and gave her room.

Karina enjoyed their arrangement the most. She acted like it was a game where she’d won all the prizes. She delighted in Dominic far more than he did in her, and after their experiment at being together as three, he politely begged off any future attempts.

Being with Karina, he did not tell Caroline, was like sleeping with somebody whose soul was a thousand miles away. Her hands and mouth on him were only physical. There was no deeper connection. She could have been anywhere at all: she only took care to make sure she was not _there_.

Ann might have been different; he liked Ann, and he appreciated how she also seemed to see what he did, Caroline’s need for protection even as she declaimed any such requirement. Ann he understood. Her problem was the opposite of Karina’s, though. Ann was _too_ present, and too private to enjoy the idea of sharing herself.

She did not even like him knowing about her and Caroline, and she certainly didn’t appreciate Caroline’s easy comfort in volunteering that information. She ducked her head when Caroline touched her in front of him and blushed when she was kissed. As for the rest of it, there was no way. Caroline did ask, once, but Ann had been appalled and Dominic scolded her for even suggesting such a thing.

“She already shares you,” he pointed out. “Don’t ask her for more than she is able to give. You are not a selfish person. Don’t pretend to be.”

He knew what selfish looked like. He also knew what it was to live so thoroughly for another person, you lost yourself to them completely.

He knew which sort Caroline was, no matter what else she might look like at times.

He knew what sort he was, too.

 

* * *

 

Caroline married James.

She didn’t have to, but she believed she did, and in the end it was all one and the same. Dominic didn’t stop her, but later he would wonder if she’d been waiting for him to try. She was never the type to just sit and wait and see so it hadn’t occurred to him that this was one time she might have needed somebody else to act on her behalf.

He understood honour and duty; he just hadn’t imagined she did, too.

They fell out of touch for a year, though he managed to keep track of her without anyone being the wiser. Then his first solo commission came through and he disappeared into Turkey for nineteen months.

No contact.

When he came back out he looked her up first thing, and found her in her father’s garden. She had a baby in her arms.

Karina was there too, uncomfortably swollen and resentful. When she saw him, he felt all her anger at her situation and the baby inside her shift and take aim directly at him. She didn’t wait, didn’t soften it in any way: just pointed at Caroline and snapped:

“That thing almost killed her. Where the hell were you?”

The flat attack was so unlike her usual voluble outbursts, all fact and no hysterics, that he knew it must have been a hundred times worse than she said. All the fear he hadn’t known to feel for Caroline at the time found him in that moment, and he met it desperately, unsure of his ability to conquer it. It would be insane to resent a child, but James Blakely Jr. almost killed the woman Dominic loved, and for one blinding moment he wanted to do to the infant what he would have done to anyone who ever raised a hand to her.

She knew. She must have known. But she did not flinch or flee; only inclined her head over the little bundle, poised and quiet in a way he had never seen her, and his whole world tilted.

Everything in him refocused in accordance to her desire. He was across the courtyard in a heartbeat, one hand hovering at the small of her back, the other settled on the baby’s head.

She knew him; knew what he was thinking, and what he had wanted to do. She must have. But she let him cradle Jamie’s head because the baby was a part of her, and where Dominic was concerned, a part of Caroline was the very safest thing anyone could ever be.

“Nothing you could have done anyway,” she said at last, and nuzzled Jamie’s nose with her own. “It was just one of those things. Placental abruption. They got me there in time. He’s okay. And I’m better now.”

She never told him how much blood she lost, how close he came to losing her, and he never asked. She was there. She was alive. That was enough.

It had to be.

 

* * *

 

They began their affair the summer she was pregnant with Grace. It was doomed from the start and they both knew it, but James was deployed and she was engulfed with a burning need like none Dominic had ever seen in her before.

“It wasn’t this bad with Jamie,” she grumbled, falling against him in the broom closet of the Japanese embassy, dragging fretfully at his dinner jacket as he struggled to remove it fast enough to suit her. “I don’t know why it’s different now. No, leave that on,” as he reached for his shirt, “I can’t wait.”

She was shaped differently. He couldn’t get over that. The newness of her curves and the placement of them was infinitely stranger to him than her assurance that James knew about them and didn’t mind. Dominic had shared her before, so he could conceive of somebody sharing her now, but he had never felt her stomach or breasts like this, and parts of her responded in ways they had never done before. She was still Caroline, but she was Caroline reborn, made entirely new.

He relearned her, a devoted student of all the ways she had altered since they were last together, and was ever-mindful of the tiny, growing presence that had brought her back to his bed, however briefly.

The places they found for themselves that summer were theirs and theirs alone, chosen with painful awareness of the need for discretion in a time when Caroline’s desire for him had robbed her of what little discretion she possessed. He spent hours working out schedules, choosing places that could be enjoyed for different lengths of time, and trying to plan their encounters accordingly.

What he didn’t plan on was the burgeoning conflict between three different countries, including her own, and the way those tensions would inevitably spill over into less than aboveboard fighting strategies.

She’d been early to their meeting point. He’d warned her against that, as unrest in the city mounted and the importance of sweeping even the most innocuous locations had increased proportionate to the nameless threat. But Ann had cancelled their lunch date and Caroline hated to wait, so she’d gone ahead to meet him there.

Instead she’d met two startled revolutionaries and overheard enough of a plan to lay a bomb against some water pipes that they had not felt they could let her go. That was when he'd found her, backed against a corner, angry and frightened, facing down two hired conspirators who were as angry and frightened as she.

He could have moved on them if she hadn’t seen him first. She didn’t do anything too obvious, but she did glance in his direction and tense at the sight of him. It was enough of a warning for them both: one grabbed her, the other went for a gun, an out of date revolver whose faulty aim was the only thing that saved his skull from exploding with the first shot.

The second bullet was aimed at him too, which was a mercy. He didn’t think he had more than a few seconds left before they’d realize she made a far simpler target, and a much stronger means of persuasion.

Those seconds were time enough for him to lock eyes with her, to communicate, with one fierce clench of his jaw, exactly what she was to do.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

He saw her start to bristle, and then saw the moment she changed her mind.

(they had figured them out; the gun was turning on her. No longer threatening his life, but his soul)

“Stand _still_ ,” one warned, “or she—”

Caroline slumped, dead weight, no longer struggling and utterly vulnerable. The sudden slack of her unbalanced the man holding her, jerked his elbow, jarred the gun—

Dominic lunged. The gun fired. The bullet ricocheted off the rock, but he didn’t feel it strike, so he kept moving; would have kept moving even if it _had_ hit him. With Caroline added to the equation, there was no other option.

They struggled over the gun what seemed like half his lifetime. The man holding Caroline had, meantime, tried to use her as some kind of shield, to maximize his leverage, but Caroline was still sloppy-slack in his arms, a dead weight of stubbornness, and Dominic had got control of the gun by the time the other man could fit his hand around Caroline’s neck.

He did not bother trying to fire it; he had just as good a chance of hitting her. Instead he whipped it directly at the other man and caught him in the temple just moments before Caroline drove her elbow up, back, and broke her captor’s nose.

Blood spurted, she stumbled free and Dominic was on him in a second.

Only when the two bodies were safely crumpled at their feet did he trust himself to wrap his arms around her.

“I told you,” he rasped, “it’s too—”

“Shh,” she begged, pressing close. “No. Don’t say it. It’s done. I’m fine . . . we’re fine.”

The ‘we’ did not include him. He tried to mind a little, to resent the baby that had not even needed to be born to usurp his place in her concern, but something about the gentle curve under his hand defied all resentment. So instead of being bothered he knelt before them both, raised the hem of her blouse and pressed his lips to the soft swell below her navel.

“We’re fine,” she repeated, stronger this time. He nodded.

“I’m glad.”

It wasn’t even a lie.

 

* * *

 

The next time he saved Grace, she was thirteen years old and she had just shot her mother.

Choking on smoke, Caroline bleeding out underneath his desperate efforts to prevent the inevitable, he had wanted to die there. But as he held Caroline against him, watching her life’s blood empty out onto the floor, she’d tipped her chin up and looked him in the eye.

“You can’t stay.”

He was going to stay. She couldn’t stop him. She must have seen it in his face, because hers, with its skin going grey and paper-thin, had firmed into a hard mask of resolve.

“You get my baby,” she ordered. “You get her out of here.”

He didn’t care about the damn kid, couldn’t she see that? The girl had shot her own mother. He was content to let her die in the fire. If it was good enough for him . . .

“Dominic.” His name was like a song on her lips, even as she coughed it up between red, foamy bubbles. “Can’t I trust you?”

Damn her. Damn him. Damn the whole fucking family that he’d given up his life to the moment he held his first love, a girl bolder than thirteen years, pressed up against him in the scarlet of a setting sun, all her life that ever was and ever would be shining in her face.

“Kiss me!” she’d dared, and he had obeyed.

He remembered holding her in that moment as he held her at the last.

“Promise me,” she ordered, and he obeyed.

Then, his word given, he bent to shield her from the flaming debris that fell around them, splitting the flesh of his skull and marking him for life with the penance he’d have to do for letting her get away.

“You can trust me,” he added. As if she didn’t already know.

But it turned out they were the words she’d been waiting for. An ugly death rattle bubbled up in her chest, the smoke thickened into a shroud, and she was gone.

Now Grace lay on the floor in front of them, one last living piece of Caroline, a promise unkept. So he set the body down, he climbed over the rubble with one good eye and a lot of blind instinct, and he gathered up the girl. She was light and live against him, and he tried not to hate her for living in the moment that her mother did not.

As the flames engulfed the shop, he carried Grace outside into the sun.

 

* * *

 

Somehow he had become a nursemaid.

Yes, the children would take grievous offence if they knew that was how he saw it, but nobody could convince Dominic these three didn’t need a keeper. Turn his back for half a moment and next thing he knew Jamie was stabbed, Karina’s boy had gotten himself accused of murder, and Grace . . . Grace had flung herself at him, all eyes and newly-stitched knife wound, compelling his help, commanding it.

Caroline’s daughter.

He deliberately did not let himself wonder if she knew what a hold she had on him. He feared the day she would understand what she did to him in a way that only Ann knew, and it was bad enough, knowing what Ann knew. He couldn’t let himself consider that Grace might know, too.

That she might not even mind.

He kept his hands inside the boy, staunching the blood, seeking out the damage, knowing the whole time that because of James Blakely Jr. somebody’s hands had once been inside Caroline to perform the same service. The blood flowing over his hands now, everything that was in his way and complicating the repair, had come from Caroline in the first place. It was all of her he had left, and he would not permit it to be lost.

“Is he—” Grace couldn’t finish out loud. She was hovering over her brother, fingers twitching at her sides like she was performing the surgery via proxy. “Will he—”

Then the boy slipped, worsened, and they tried to remove his sister. Dominic didn’t object; Eleanor was right, Grace shouldn’t see her brother like that. It was enough that she saw her mother again now; enough that she remembered, and knew what she had done. Even as he blamed her for what she’d cost him, he admired, grudgingly, the kind of strength it must take to keep going afterward. He had been more than twice her age the first time he killed, and it hadn’t been easy. Not at first.

So he didn’t mind when they tried to take her, but he didn’t protest when she fought for the right to stay. She stood at his side, steadying a flashlight beam to illuminate his efforts.

“Please, Jamie,” she whispered. “Don’t let go.”

For a moment it took him entirely out of himself. He was standing under a cloudless sky with the light of his entire existence pressed against his body, her eyes shining, bright with the promise of a life they would never share.

“Don’t let go,” she’d murmured, sweet, earnest.

As if he’d ever.

Then Grace, rock steady, staggered beside him and he didn’t miss a beat, snapping back to the present and wrapping an arm around her waist to bear her up.

“Will you sit down, if I tell you to?”

“No.”

Of course she wouldn’t. Goddamn stubborn girl. Her mother’s daughter.

“You will sit down if I make you,” he warned. She looked steadily up at him, eyes bright, jaw set.

“You had better make me, then.”

He swore under his breath, though as a courtesy he chose a language he was pretty sure she didn’t know. But she seemed to take his meaning anyway because she laughed.

“My father swears like that when we make him angry too.”

Dominic wasn’t sure if the mention of her father was a deliberate dig at him, at his role in all of this, or if she was merely making one of an endless number of inevitable comparisons. He’d met her father. You’d have had to be blind to miss the resemblance.

Caroline had definitely had a type.

“Does your father beat you?” he asked dryly. “Because if I were your father, I would be tempted.”

She shrugged. “You’d need your hands free for that.”

He snorted softly and adjusted the makeshift clamp he’d set in place.

“Soon we will bind up the wound. We will put him in the helicopter. I will have my hands free. Then, just wait.”

She leaned in a little, angling the light.

“Will he . . .”

“I don’t know.”

He could offer no more than that. Grace seemed to know this, and nodded, accepting.

Trusting.

His hands had held this boy’s head as an infant because Caroline had trusted him with every part of her life. Now he bound up the wound with rough stitches and a gauze pad. Grace stood mute with the light carefully directed because she trusted him to piece together what shambles were left of hers.

“It’s as good as I can make it,” he said, and turned off the overhead light to dim their view of Jamie struggling to survive. Impulsively, he echoed her mother’s words from a day when he thought he’d known how it would all end.

“Do you trust me?”

Grace looked him dead in the eyes, nothing hidden, and he felt himself fall.

“For now.”

Then she stood on her tiptoes and pressed a light kiss to the lower portion of the scar he’d earned for them both, the mother who could not last and the daughter who knew that nothing did.

She trusted him. That was enough.

For now.

**Author's Note:**

> A very mad and merry Yuletide to you. This will have to do until our final canon installment makes its appearance.
> 
> Meantime, I hope you enjoy these thoroughly fucked up people and their fantastically doomed romance(s) even half as much as I did writing them!


End file.
